The Hike With My Oldest Friend

A story about walking side by side with the one person I can never leave behind.

I needed air. I needed space. I needed out. So I laced up my old trail shoes and grabbed a bottle of water that had lived too long in the fridge. The trees were calling, and I didn’t want company.

But he came anyway.

He always does.

He didn’t say much at first, just walked a few steps behind me, crunching twigs and humming some half-remembered tune from childhood. I didn’t mind. He’s used to me ignoring him, and I’m used to him tagging along whether I like it or not.

You’d think, after all these years, I’d be used to his presence. But sometimes he’s exhausting. Other times, I’m sure he’s the only one who really knows me. It’s complicated, the relationship I have with the one person I can never break up with: myself.

We walked quietly for a while, the kind of quiet that hums with thought. I watched how the sunlight filtered through the leaves and danced on the dirt path like it had somewhere to go. I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. He was looking at the same light. I think he liked it too.

“You could stand to exercise more,” I said out loud, half-joking.

He shrugged, not offended. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

“But you hate the gym,” I added.

“Despise it.”

“But you like this,” I said, gesturing toward the trail, the trees, the hush. “This kind of movement.”

He nodded. “I like going nowhere slowly.”

That made me smile. It was one of those sentences that meant more than it should.

Sometimes I treat him like a project. Like there’s a checklist I need to complete so he can finally be… what? Finished? Better? Worth something?

But he’s not broken. He’s just human.

He forgets things. He makes up stories in his head. He promises to change and then doesn’t. And yeah, sometimes he lies—mostly to himself. Tells himself it’s fine. That it doesn’t matter. That he’s not tired. That he’s not hurt.

But I’m learning to catch him gently. Not with shame. Not with judgment. Just with awareness.

We hit a fork in the trail—one path steep and rocky, the other smoother and sun-drenched. I looked at him. He looked at me.

“I know which one you’re going to choose,” I said.

“Do you?” he asked.

And for a second, I didn’t. I realized I’d been assuming a lot about him lately.

He surprised me. Took the harder path. The one we used to avoid.

I followed.

Halfway up, we stopped to breathe. Not because we were out of breath—but because the view required it.

It wasn’t anything grand. Just a few distant rooftops peeking out of the trees and a hawk circling above, slow and sure. But I felt something loosen in my chest. I turned to him, this familiar stranger who lives behind my eyes.

“I’ve been kind of a jerk to you,” I said.

He laughed. “Yeah, but I get it. I’m not always easy.”

“I’ve been trying to fix you.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Maybe I should just… walk with you. Talk with you. Suggest things gently.”

He smiled. “That’d be nice.

We sat on a fallen log and passed the water bottle back and forth. Talked about how tired we are of judging ourselves, how heavy it feels to break promises to the one person who remembers every single one.

“I want to stop lying to you,” I said.

“I want that too,” he whispered.

We talked about control—how we can’t steer the wind or the thoughts of others, but we can listen more. Take less. Expect less. Care without clinging.

“You hold so tightly to things,” I said.

“I know. It’s fear, mostly,” he replied. “Fear that if I let go, I’ll lose who I am.”

“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems,” I remembered reading once. Epictetus, maybe.

“But maybe,” I said, “you’ll find who you were always meant to become.”

He didn’t answer. But I saw something soften in his face.

As we hiked back down, the sun began to fall. Shadows stretched long across the path. He whistled a tune again, this time something new, or maybe something old we’d both forgotten.

At the base of the trail, we stopped. I turned to him.

“You’re my most important friend,” I said. “The only one who never leaves.”

He smiled. “I know. I’m with you everywhere.”

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection,” I thought to myself. Maybe Buddha knew something we all forget.

And as we walked back into the rhythm of our ordinary life—where dishes need doing and inboxes pile up—I felt it:

A quiet trust.

Not in perfection.

But in presence.

In the one who’s been there all along.